Giving voice to the
voicelessImproving
access to the vote for people experiencing homelessness

Hope on the horizon for disenfranchised homeless
citizens.

What do we mean by 'democracy'? It depends who you
are talking to. Being an optimistic fellow, Gandhi described it as a system that
'gives the weak the same chance as the strong'. A more cynical Benjamin
Franklin defined democracy quite differently, as 'two
wolves and a lamb
voting on what to have for lunch'.

While it is not a perfect system, we like to think Gandhi's version of
democracy is closer to the truth: that in Australia it means
everyone has the
chance to have a say in how their country is governed, and by
whom.[1]

For most people, the act of voting does not bestow any real sense of personal
empowerment: dropping a paper into a ballot box is unlikely
to cause a rush of
blood to the head. Voting is a civil right, the value of which may seem largely
formal. But at a symbolic or
ritual level, it speaks volumes: no matter what
their personal circumstances, on that single day voters know they share the same
power and relevance as their fellow citizens. If that power is denied to them,
the implications are disturbing.

Before the last federal election, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)
ran a TV campaign to encourage people to enrol and vote.
The voiceover said: 'On
election day every voice will be heard, and every vote will count'. But the
advertisement did not acknowledge
that a significant group in our society
cannot fully participate in democracy: people experiencing homelessness. In
effect, they
lack a political voice.

Homelessness as a barrier to participation in
democracy

We do not have any solid figures on what percentage of Australia's homeless
population is registered to vote. It has never
been investigated. But
the barriers that stand between them and the ballot box suggest the numbers are
very low. Hanover Welfare
Services estimates that approximately one-third of
homeless people are not registered to
vote.[2]The Australian Federation of
Homeless Organisations {AFHO) estimates that more than 90% of homeless people
are not registered to vote.[3]

Taking into account that 88,000 homeless Australians are of
voting age, the Public Interest Law Clearing House {PILCH) has used
the above
figures to estimate the number of homeless people who may have been eligible to
vote in the last federal election, but
did not do so, as ranging from 29,000 to
80,000.

The most obvious barrier is the lack of a permanent address. You cannot
write 'third alleyway on the left', or 'no fixed abode',
or 'youth refuge
tonight, no idea tomorrow night' in the address section of your enrolment form.
Nor will your details be updated
on the electoral roll if you keep moving
from one form of temporary accommodation to another.

Secondly, homeless voters have never been a target group for the AEC. There
has been a huge push to get more young people, and more
rural people, onto the
roll -that is, those who are in secure housing.

The AEC even has special 'remote mobile polling' teams to visit isolated
communities, and recently launched an extensive four-year
study aimed at
increasing enrolment rates among young people - the AEC describes it as 'a major
investment in Australia's
future'.[4]

But no effort has ever been made to make the vote more
accessible for people experiencing homelessness.

Another barrier is that someone who enrols but does not vote can be fined (as
indeed can someone who fails to enrol). If they do not
receive the fine because
they have no letterbox or have moved repeatedly, and if they do not write to the
AEC giving a 'valid reason
for failing to vote' -and there are no clear, public
guidelines on what constitutes a 'valid reason'-they can be fined $50 plus court
costs. If they do not eventually pay this fine, they could even end up serving a
few days in jail.

For people whose lives have been turned upside down by homelessness, the
threat of that fine is a real disincentive to enrolling.
Someone experiencing
the turmoil, instability and stress of being homeless cannot predict what their
situation will be on polling
day. They may well be in crisis and have other,
much more urgent priorities.

Attitudes to voting

Some people experiencing homelessness say voting is a pointless exercise;
others are keen to participate. Attitudes vary, just as
they do in the general
population.

It is possible that, as a group, people who have experienced
homelessness may show a higher than average degree of disillusionment
with the
political system. Prior to the last federal election, Melbourne's Hanover
Welfare services ran a study asking their clients
about voting. Seventy-eight
per cent felt politicians have little or no understanding of their predicament.
Two-thirds felt politicians
do not care about people in their situation. Close
to half felt the outcome of the election would make little or no difference to
their circumstances. More than one quarter were definitely not enrolled, and
another 13% did not know whether they were enrolled.
With the federal election
less than a week away, 61% were intending to vote, 19% were intending not to
vote, and 20% were unsure.[5]

But the larger point is that those who do wish to exercise their democratic
rights must be able to do so. A staff member at the Australian
Bureau of
Statistics put it frankly: 'If your name is not on the electoral roll then
effectively, as far as the system goes, you
don't really exist'. Some people
experiencing homelessness might wish to keep their engagement with 'the system'
to a minimum, and
are not interested in enrolling or voting. But the larger
point is that those who do wish to exercise their democratic rights must
be able
to do so.

The author spoke to a young man called Michael Sutherland, who is currently
working as a Big Issue vendor. The Big Issue is a news and current
affairs magazine with a social justice focus. It is sold on the streets by
homeless or unemployed vendors who keep
half of the cover price as direct
income. Michael is 19 and now has his own place after living on the streets for
a year. He voted
in the last federal election. He said he thinks it is important
for people experiencing homelessness to be able to vote if they want
to, and
that it is unfair to fine them if they enrol but do not make it to the ballot
box: 'People in that situation need support,'
he said, 'not more hassles'.

Michael had this to say on the subject of participation: 'Some people don't
want to vote because they're sick of bullshit processes,
they don't trust
politicians, or they just don't care because they're caught up in drugs. I vote
because I want to help clean up
the country, and I want a fair government.'
The policies that would win Michael's vote include cheaper public transport,
lower fuel
prices, solutions to unemployment, boosting the levels of income
support payments and the abolition of work for the dole. 'People
should be paid
properly to do that work, so they gain more skills, they can live better and
start to get a good career happening',
he said.

What is the significance
of the 'homeless vote'?

There are plenty of people like Michael who want to vote but probably will
not, because they have no fixed address. This is a significant
issue: the
homeless population of Australia totals more than an entire federal electorate.
These are the people experiencing the
hard-end consequences of government
policies. To give them a political voice could have some very interesting
effects, particularly
in marginal seats. In the 1993 federal election, for
example, 13 seats were won by fewer than 500 votes).

The last federal election was our most expensive ever: it cost $100 million
to run. But none of that money was put towards making
voting more accessible for
the estimated 88,000 Australians who are homeless and of voting age.

We could speculate why no politician has ever bothered trying to capture the
'homeless vote': these prospective voters are unlikely
to buy the argument that
the country is in great shape; they can not make cash donations to the party
offering them the most promising
vision of the future. But if they had more of a
political voice, who knows? Politicians might begin to consider their needs more
closely.

So much for the bad news -now for some good news.

The itinerant electors provision: an avenue for
change?

Just over two years ago, The Big Issue launched a 'Votes for the
Homeless' campaign, aimed at improving access to the vote for people
experiencing homelessness.

Prior to that, the homeless vote had never been examined on a national scale.
When the AEC was asked why this was the case, their
spokesperson sounded
supportive. He admitted that the issue deserved attention, but because of the
way our electoral system is structured,
people experiencing homelessness tend to
slip through the gaps.

Along with the Homeless Persons Legal Clinic (run by the Public Interest Law
Clearing House, or PILCH, which has contributed some
substantial expertise and
resources to this issue) The Big Issue discovered a potential avenue to
address the problem: s 96, a half-forgotten provision of the Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1918 (Cth) titled 'Itinerant Electors'.

This provision is intended as a voting avenue for people with no fixed
address. But hardly anyone knows about it: there are only around
4000 itinerant
electors in Australia, and according to the AEC, '99 per cent of them are not
homeless', but are fruit pickers and
other seasonal workers. The itinerant
electors avenue has never been explored or publicised as a voting option for
people who are
homeless.

One good thing about the itinerant electors provision is that if you register
under it, but do not make it to the ballot box, you
will not be fined. However,
the provision would need to be tinkered with before it could function smoothly
for people experiencing
homelessness. As defined, an itinerant voter must have
been staying at their current address for less than one month. Yet people
experiencing homelessness often spend several months in temporary accommodation,
so the time limit needs to be more flexible. The
itinerant electors enrolment
form also needs to be simplified to make it more user friendly.

Early in 2002, The Big Issue,the Homeless Persons Legal Clinic and the
Council to Homeless Persons (CHP) made submissions to the Joint Standing
Committee on Electoral
Matters, recommending that various measures be put in
place to make it easier for homeless people to exercise their right to vote.
Those recommendations focused on revamping the itinerant electors provision,
working with homelessness services to help their clients
to enrol and vote,
increasing voter awareness and making the whole process more accessible and less
punitive.[6]

The next election: homelessness on the
agenda?

To the delight of the advocating bodies, the Committee took most of those
suggestions on board. In its recent report on the last federal
election, the
committee recommended amendment of the itinerant electors section to apply more
clearly to homeless people, and to
simplify the enrolment
form.[7]The AEC has undertaken to
target homeless people in its next public awareness campaign, to inform them on
how they can vote under
the provision. The three organisations pushing for
change on this front (The Big Issue, PILCH and CHP) would also like to
see the AEC setting up mobile polling booths in locations where there are high
numbers of homeless
people.

In 2000, after a five-year campaign headed by The Big Issue in the UK,
voting laws were changed so that people experiencing homelessness could register
by giving 'an address of local connection'
- a park or drop-in centre where they
spend time. In the UK prior to 2000, this group could not vote at
all.[8]Anecdotally, following the
introduction of this legislation, the uptake at the last British election was
fairly low. But by recognising
in law that homelessness does exist and that it
creates barriers to participation in society, and by trying to address one of
those
barriers, the legislation is significant. It was welcomed by UK charities
as a step forward for the rights of people experiencing
homelessness.

UK research into 'missing voters' concluded that a significant proportion of
them are young people, particularly those from ethnic
minorities, as well as
people who are homeless or transient (which includes the large Gypsy population
in the UK).[9]

In Australia, the AEC is currently looking at how voting can be made more
accessible for people experiencing homelessness, and says
it plans to consult
with the homelessness sector on this issue. It is important to ensure already
stretched homelessness services
are not lumped with extra work they are not
resourced to do.

Concerns have also been raised over the proposed introduction of requirements
for all voters to produce original forms of identity.
If adopted, this measure
would further disadvantage people who are in transient or unstable life
situations and who do not have access
to these documents - for example women
fleeing domestic violence or people sleeping rough. As it stands the Joint
Standing
Committee on Electoral Matters has compromised, recommending that new
enrollees or re-enrollees produce original documentary proof
of identity or
letters from two people currently on the electoral roll confirming their
identity.[10]Needless to say, if
adopted and applied to itinerant enrolments, these criteria will prevent many
homeless people from being able
to vote.

For young people, the question of access to the vote is particularly
significant. When homelessness is part of a person's early experiences,
a sense
of powerlessness and disconnection from society can become very entrenched. Many
young people already feel politics has nothing
to do with their own lives and
circumstances, and don't see voting as worthwhile or relevant.

Making the voting process less onerous for people experiencing homelessness
is all very well. Legislative change is all very well.
But unless those people
feel that voting is actually worthwhile, unless politicians begin to consider
and communicate with them,
there is unlikely to be a stampede on the polling
booths.

Putting the future of the powerful people who run our country more firmly
into the hands of those who are most marginalised is a small
but significant
step towards greater equality -in theory, at least. How it works in practice
remains to be seen: whether, as Gandhi
might have envisaged, there is a shift in
the balance of power between the 'weak' and the 'strong' - or whether, as
Benjamin Franklin
suspected, the lamb still ends up as lunch.

The AEC has recruited a public relations agency to run an awareness campaign
around this issue; that agency will join the AEC to discuss
with homeless
agencies the best strategies for helping their clients enrol and vote.

One positive spin-off is that this should generate some publicity and put
homelessness on the public agenda. This will be an opportunity
for those of us
working in this area to remind the media, the government and wider society that
while these changes should be welcomed
as a step forward for the rights of
people experiencing homelessness, when someone is in the situation where their
life has been
turned upside down and all their energy goes towards day-to-day
survival, exercising democratic rights is probably the last thing
on their mind
For having a home, a job, and a sense that you are valued by the society you
live in is where the real power lies.

[*]Meg Mundell is a Youth
Policy Officer with the Council to Homeless Persons and former deputy editor of
The Big Issue Australia, where
she was also director of the magazines 'Votes for
the Homeless' campaign. She also works as a freelance journalist and is a
fellow
of OzProspect.

[1] Australian citizens are legally
entitled and indeed required to vote at federal elections, provided they are 18
or older, have not
been convicted of treason, are not serving a prison term of
more than five years and are 'capable of understanding the nature and
significance of voting (which rules out some people suffering from mental
illness): Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918(Cth) s 93.

[5] Figures taken from Hanover
Stats and Facts: Homelessness and the Federal Election, Hanover (November
2001). Sample size was 175 clients: 55% were female; 30%wereparents; 35% were
aged 18 to 25; 38% were aged 26 to
40 years; the remaining 27% were over age
40.

[6] The Homeless Persons Legal
Clinic (PILCH) has also lodged a substantial submission to the Victorian
Government focusing on this issue
with regard to state elections.

[7] Joint Standing Committee on
Electoral Matters (JSCEM), Parliament of Australia, Report of the Inquiry
into the Conduct of the 2001 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto
(June 2003) 92-93.

[8] As well as helping to
enfranchise the homeless population of that country, the Representation of
the People Act 2000 (UK) also gave voting rights to remand prisoners,
squatters and certain patients of mental institutions. These groups can also now
use postal voting.